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                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 78

BOOKS

The Right Stuff About The Oval Office


By WALTER SHAPIRO

    TITLE: What It Takes
    AUTHOR: Richard Ben Cramer
    PUBLISHER: Random House; 1,047 PAGES; $28

    THE BOTTOM LINE: The best look at presidential politics
since Dan Quayle was in the National Guard.


    For once the dust jacket gets it right: What It Takes
"does for politicians what Tom Wolfe did for astronauts in The
Right Stuff." Left unsaid -- and in this 1,047-page doorstop of
an epic only the dust jacket is terse -- was precisely Wolfe's
accomplishment in The Right Stuff. Wolfe took an event we all
were certain we knew so well that it bored us to tears and
convinced us that The Whole Thing Was a Lie. We had so
internalized the public relations myths of the original Mercury
astronauts that we had missed the real story.

    So too with Richard Ben Cramer's artful reworking of the
too-dispiriting-for-words 1988 presidential campaign. He
achieves the near impossible by making us care -- and
vicariously relive -- the failed and half-forgotten presidential
quests of Bob Dole, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden and Gary Hart. He
even mines a few fresh nuggets of insight about the
oft-ridiculed campaign styles of George Bush and Michael
Dukakis.

    Cramer, once a Pulitzer-Prizewinning foreign correspondent
for the Philadelphia Inquirer, had the chutzpah to attempt the
ultimate look-Ma-no-hands high-wire act as he searched for a
fresh vantage point from which to look down on presidential
politics. Though there are backstage meetings and tense
strategic debates, What It Takes is not Theodore White's Making
of the President series revisited. For one thing, Cramer views
the overpaid and overpraised parade of pollsters and media
advisers as a comic chorus to be irreverently dismissed as "wise
guys," "Big Guys," "killers" and (his sobriquet for the Bush
team) "White Guys." Unlike the sainted Teddy White and the
current crop of political reporters who grew up on his
mythmaking, Cramer loathes, not loves, the modern political
process.

    Both the anger and the human sympathy that animate What It
Takes are rooted in this perception. Cramer believes with some
justice that the rituals of presidential politics (the
sound-bite speeches, the handlers, the mind-numbing travel and
the press claque with its self-aggrandizing agenda) end up
blinding us to who the candidates actually are and what their
life histories represent. "I wanted to know not about the
campaign, but about the campaigners," Cramer explains in his
introduction. For what fascinates him is "how people like us --
with dreams and doubts, great talents and ordinary frailties --
get to be people like them." That is, what does it take to
create a candidate so driven in his pursuit of the White House
that he jettisons family, friends, any semblance of privacy or
normal human existence on the altar of naked ambition?

    The sensitively wrought and, yes, controversial sections
of the book are Cramer's loving portraits of Hart and Biden,
the two Big Losers, the twin sinners driven from the fold by
both their own folly and the blood lust of gotcha! journalism.
As someone who covered Hart, I do not fully share Cramer's
unalloyed admiration for the former Colorado Senator's cool
intellect and fabled New Ideas. As a typical voyeur, I was a tad
disappointed by Cramer's tentative conclusion that maybe, just
maybe, Hart was not guilty of anything more with Donna Rice than
very heavy flirting. But as a reporter I winced with
embarrassment over the accuracy of Cramer's fevered portrayal
of the press pack during the final days: "Every incident of
Hart-chase got hotter . . . blood pounding in the temples,
bodies banging, elbows flying . . . and every instant increased
the visceral certainty that something huge, historic, horrible
. . . was happening! They had to do something! They have to have
at least a part . . . if not, what were they doing? Who were
they?"

    Biden, the accused plagiarist, the Delaware Senator who
loved Neil Kinnock's oratory neither wisely nor well, comes
alive as the most vivid and perhaps most unfairly wronged of the
candidates. The opening Biden scene is a classic: the would-be
candidate and a pair of advisers from his stable of "experts,
gurus and self-appointed Rasputins" driving manically around
Wilmington in the darkness looking at dream houses, for Biden
is as obsessed with real estate as he is with the presidency.
When things turn sour for Biden, when the bleats of the non-stop
news cycle suggest that his entire life is a lie, he still finds
time to do something touching and human by visiting his high
school alma mater to watch his son play football. At the game,
Biden takes his old teachers aside, one by one, mostly priests,
to tell them, "I want you to know I didn't cheat . . . I mean
I didn't forget what you taught me . . ." The book ends with
Biden, who nearly died of a brain aneurysm in early 1988,
looking hopefully toward the future and musing, "If he lived
long enough . . . people would know, he never cheated in law
school."

    What about Bush, the ultimate survivor, the single
candidate who never questions the instructions of his handlers,
the White Guys? Cramer's portrait is adroit, detailed but,
ultimately, not terribly surprising: Bush is the friendliest man
in America, untroubled by ideas, motivated by a keen sense of
duty and patrician noblesse oblige. There are telling details:
Bush's first written act as President-elect is to compose "the
message for the annual Christmas card." Where Cramer excels is
in portraying Bush's sterile life inside the bubble -- the
Secret-Service-secure world of motorcades, advancemen, rope
lines and step-by-step schedules that allowed the Vice President
to travel halfway across the country and "never see one person
who was not a friend or someone whose sole purpose it was to
serve or protect him." To Cramer, the bubble and all the
trappings that come with it have left Bush an empty shell, a man
you could look square in the eye and discover that "there was
. . . no one home."

    It is tempting to conclude that What It Takes should be
read -- and despite its heft, the prose is a joyous journey --
as a primer for the 1992 campaign. But Ross Perot, win or lose,
has changed all that; the rise of easy access talk TV is likely
to curtail permanently the madcap media-market frenzy of
campaign travel. So, in a sense, Cramer has created a monument
to a world that no longer exists -- a perfect-pitch rendering
of the emotions, the intensity, the anguish and the emptiness
of what may have been the last normal two-party campaign in
American history.